“It can’t have been easy being a caveman, living the life of a hunter gatherer. … However, though the gathering might have been relatively rural, the hunting was hell. Meat wasn’t easy to catch, whether it came in the form of a slavering jawed dinosaur, a leaping gazelle, or even a jet propelled small rodent or rabbit. … the very necessary function of feeding human families, who – back in those prehistoric times – had very few alternatives to meat and veg. … Many, many thousands of years ago then, snares were a means to survival. And not only for food. The hunter made sure that he visited the trap regularly so that animals did not disfigure or maim themselves in their struggles. It wasn’t an example of prehistoric animal welfare, it was a matter of keeping warm. Nobody wants a fur coat with rips and tears in it.” (http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2987646/snares_a_barbaric_relic_whose_time_is_up.html)

Perhaps Bill Oddie’s ancestors were contemporary with dinosaurs. Perhaps that’s how he knows how often hunters visited their traps thousands of years ago. Or perhaps this is a result of his special food options, I suppose involving mycoprotein and synthetic vitamins, while the rest of us still have few alternatives to meat and veg. Perhaps he’s simply aiming his writing at the lowest common denominator i.e. those who set snares. However, his reasoning has more holes in it than a creature snared in barbed wire.

“Decades of persecution by gamekeepers meeting their landowners’ desires for grouse or pheasant conservation for hunts, meant that by 1914 wildcats had been wiped out across the British and Irish Isles in all but the North and West of Scotland.
When the landowners and gamekeepers went off to fight in the First World War it gave the wildcats a break and they began to expand back into the rest of Scotland.” (http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2986566/saving_scotlands_highland_tiger.html)

Has government considered allowing game shooters to fight terrorists? This would be much more fun for them and give our wildlife a break. Win:win.